The Black Capital of the World

In the early years of the last century, the arrival of immigrants from the American south and the West Indies transformed the neighbourhood into the Negro Mecca, the greatest black city in the world. And for our purposes it's interesting because of its design: the design of the clothes the people wore and the design of the streetscape through which they moved.

The place is the subject of 'Black Metropolis: Harlem, 1915-1930', a fascinating project now being undertaken by a group of historians from the University of Sydney, which has now brought forth, among other things, a website called 'digital Harlem'.